How to harness the power of GTmetrix

Nowadays everything is just a click away from our computer screens but sometimes we come across websites, which process extremely slow. If you ever encountered such sites, you would know that the most common reaction is leaving and looking elsewhere for a similar website with a faster response. When we are talking e-businesses, slow site speed could give your competitors an upper hand and take a toll on your profits. How so?

Importance of Loading Speed in Websites

The number of people coming into your website is crucial, because, the more the number of visitors, the more the revenue. It is essential to have more traffic to help increase your business, and so every click matters. However, when your website operates slowly, it causes mild frustration among users and gives them the opportunity to leave and visit other sites, those of your competitors’. As the number of views decreases your profit decreases too. Not only that, due to the lack of visitors, your website goes down the search engine charts, which means fewer people will find your website when searching with related keywords on Google, Yahoo and similar search engines.

This is why the load speed of pages in your website is one of the most vital metrics to account for if you want your page to run successfully. A website’s loading speed always does not depend on the internet speed of the users; the underlying design is also involved in this procedure. This is one of those minor details that can be easily looked over during web development, costing businesses a lot more than they bargained for. However, there is actually more to this! And a good place that aids you monitor various speed related issues is GTmetrix.

GTmetrix is an application dedicated to help in the analysis of your website and help reach its full potential. There are numerous relevant tools which helps monitor your website’s performance at a glance. If you are new to the concept, GTmetrix has it covered. The developers offer a free trial service for a limited time with some key features that help you decide whether it is best suited for you or not. You can later decide to purchase the software to unleash its full potential and help you more thoroughly with the analysis and enhancing performance.

GTmetrix with similar web applications

There are many other similar applications that can be used to analyze page response time, like Yahoo! YSlow and Google Pagespeed.

Yahoo! YSlow offers description as to why your page is running slow while giving you a score of your page’s performance. Similarly, Google Pagespeed measures the time taken for the first top bit of the page to load and then the entirety of the page to load and gives a score of hundred. This score can be analyzed to increase efficiency.

Both applications are useful and give you additional information using different methods of observation; however, GTmetrix makes it easier by providing both information, enabling more efficient analysis on one platform. So, you can get something that one couldn’t detect from the other without having to jump in between two applications.

Features and Functions in GTmetrix

There are a number of functions and features you get with the GTmetrix web application; here is a summarized version to help you understand what you can expect from their services.

GTmetrix Report Page

GTmetrix Report page brings you clear, easy to understand data on your page performance which was made according to key indicators. Here the reports include: the gridline structure from Google Pagespeed and Yahoo! YSlow, the count for total page size, page loading time and number of requests to visit the page, and your average position amongst all other GTmetrix sites.

Performance Track

The performance of your page can be tracked using more demonstrative graphs based on average counts and scheduled monitoring which you can set at certain intervals. The application will perform accordingly. You can also set up custom alerts that will notify you when the target has dropped below your expectations. You can also use the results as a guild line to help enhance and adjust your page according to the traffic’s needs.

As can be seen, the features here include page monitoring to ensure optimum performance, easy graphs for visual interpretation, customized data range, marking areas of concern for easier access to those data, notification and alerts according to individual needs.

Different Platform Analysis

GTmetrix also has the feature to send your website link to an android device and getting results from that analysis based on the page loading and response time. Next, it gives you collected data from there ensuring you know what is going on beyond just computer screens. This takes the analysis option to a whole new level and helps you out with finer details when you are customizing your website’s performance for the better.

Time-lapse Video of page loads

This feature extends up to both computers and android devices. The idea of this is to make a back to back video on your page loading time processing, throughout the changes you made. It helps you see for yourself the changes made, the problems affecting your traffic as well as a better perspective on the changes that needs to be made as well as the errors.

Here you have the options to slow the playback of your website’s loading performance, combine alerts into this system, and make filmstrips to look over them in actual time.

Optimized Way Of Using GTmetrix

All these features might be overwhelming, to begin with, so it’s best to prioritize what you need to do in order to achieve the best results for your revenue. Keep track of these three things and surely it will be easier than you could have anticipated.

Conduct Regular Tests:

When you are starting with the tests, it is best to be regular throughout the day to get regular updates on the changes. If you continue this over a certain period of time, surely you will understand the crowd on your website as well as the adjustments needed as well as the performance of your site.

Choose Locations:

When you conduct random tests, you don’t know which server the information is being checked from and so the results you may receive might be confusing. Better to start with a specific location and interpret the results from there, for example, servers near your location, cities, or countries.

Choose Targets:

Select the pages of your website with the most information. Those pages should be the ones you are going to regularly monitor the changes from. Usually, homepages are the ones with the least description of your business and the links that redirect to other pages. So it’s best not to look into them for analysis.

GTmetrix service is one of the key tools that would help you to obtain a faster website, offering the best e-commerce business analysis and solutions to help you reach your full potential and increase revenue. This might be the little push you need to get ahead of the crowd with speed. We also offer analytics research and business intelligence reports development services specific for the e-Commerce businesses. To know more about our e-Commerce solutions and services, drop us an email at info@illusivedesign.net